Runaway Train
by dragonflybeach
Summary: A series of train-centered one shots about finding peace after the war. All DH compliant. Various & assorted characters, paired or not. So far - Harry, Druna, and George.
1. Harry

A/N - Just a suggestion - the song "Runaway Train" by Soul Asylum.

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><p>Harry Potter just couldn't take any more.<p>

So on Saturday morning, he took a walk. Not far, just around the corner from Grimmauld Place, just enough to be pretending to read a book that Hermione left behind (what was a Wuthering Height, anyway?) and accidentally-on-purpose run into a young man. They became entangled, and Harry came away with a few strands of the stranger's hair.

An hour later, he stood in King's Cross Station, disguised as the anonymous fellow, carrying a duffle bag with three changes of clothes. He hadn't meant to eavesdrop, but when the young lady in front of him asked the clerk "How far can I get from here as soon as possible?" it caught his attention.

"There's a train leaving in half an hour with a terminal point of Edinburgh." The clerk peered over the top of his glasses at her.

"Fantastic," she nodded enthusiastically. "I'd like a one way ticket."

Harry soon found himself in front of the ticket window. "I'd also like a one way ticket to Edinburgh."

He found his way to the platform where the young lady sat waiting.

"Are you following me?" she asked with an infectious smile.

Harry shrugged. "Getting as far away as possible as soon as possible sounded like a good plan to me too."

She gestured for him to have a seat on the bench beside her.

"Do I know you?" Harry asked. "You look a little familiar, but I can't place you."

"Is that supposed to be a pickup line?" she rolled her eyes.

Harry grinned. "No, but it certainly sounded like one, didn't it?"

They boarded the train, finding a otherwise empty car.

"So," Harry looked across at her. "What are you running away from?"

She scrunched up her face in thought, but on her it was cute. "Expectations." She said finally.

Harry cocked his head at her in curiosity, silently encouraging her to go on.

"My family is wealthy. That may be why I look familiar. We're in the society pages sometimes." She made an expression of disgust. "All my life, I've been raised to grow up and become the perfect trophy wife. I've decided I don't want that. I'm seventeen years old. I don't know what I want to do with my life. I don't even know if I want to go to university or not. But I do know that I want more from life than just parties and sitting around looking pretty."

"I take it your parents don't see things the same way," Harry said conspiratorially.

"Not in the least." She rolled her eyes. "What about you? What are you running from?"

He looked into the air above her head for a moment. "I guess I would say expectations as well. For the past several years, everyone around me has been waiting for me to do this one thing. Now it's done and over. But everyone else seems to be waiting for me to do something else brilliant, and they all think I have all the answers to all the world's problems. I don't." he shrugged. "I just want to go back to having a normal eighteen year old's life, but this whole thing has been hanging over my head so long, it's like I don't know how to be normal."

"I know what you mean." She nodded. "I just want to be normal too."

"I feel like I'm not." he continued. "It's like I've become jaded to the world, and I don't want to be that way. It's crazy, part of me wants to feel nothing at all. But part of me is terrified of ending up that way."

"Don't shut yourself off." she shook her head. "Feel everything. Good, bad, or otherwise. You're not being true to yourself if you don't."

"I just want to feel like what I did was worth all of it. I don't, seeing as how my friends didn't get their happy ending. That was all I wanted out of the situation, for everything and everyone to be all right. And it didn't turn out that way." he ended on a note that was dangerously close to hysteria.

"One person can't save the world." she looked at him with a mixture of sympathy and something else he couldn't define. "All you can do is to help in whatever way you can, and then let go. If you hold on too long, you'll make yourself crazy. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to go on with your own life and let others go on with theirs."

"So how do we find this "normal" thing? The kind of life normal people have?" Harry asked.

She shrugged. "I have some money. I figured I would get a flat. Maybe find a job, maybe take a class. Just live in the world and find out what it is _I_ like, instead of being told what I like."

"It sounds like you have a plan." Harry looked out the window.

"You don't?" she asked, drawing his attention back inside.

It was his turn to shrug. "Three hours ago, I was planning to go to a friend's house today. All of this was completely off the cuff."

She looked impressed. "Totally spontaneous, huh? That's rather daring."

He snorted. "And that's the whole thing. Everyone thinks I'm some daring, brave, wonderful hero. And I'm not. I'm just ...me."

"Maybe you are daring, brave, and wonderful. You just don't see it." she offered.

"But what if I don't want to be?" he looked at her with sadness.

"You are who you are." she replied sagely. "You have to take who you are, and what you want, and weave them into the person you will become."

He smiled with admiration at the muggle girl. "You're very wise for someone who's only seventeen."

She looked down at the table, embarassed. "My sister says I'm an old soul, whatever that means." she looked back up at him, changing the subject. "Do you have brothers and sisters?"

He shook his head sadly. "No. I was an only child. And my parents both died. I have an aunt and uncle, but I don't get on with them very well. The closest thing I really have to a family is my best friend's family. They've somewhat taken me in."

"That's not totally a bad thing." she had an odd look on her face. "You don't have to worry about disappointing as many people."

He reached across the table to pat her hand. "I can't imagine that your family would be disappointed in your becoming the best person you can be. Surely they just need some time to adjust to the idea. Then they will realize what an even more wonderful daughter they have."

She smiled shyly. "You're very kind to say that, Mr. …." She looked to him expectantly.

"Um, M – Malfoy," he shuddered inwardly, clueless as to why _that_ was the first name that came to his mind. "Dray – Drake Malfoy."

She smirked at him, one eyebrow raised. "You could have just said you didn't want to tell me."

"Excuse me?" Harry's eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

"Draco Malfoy has never done anything in his life he would consider brilliant." She leaned across the table and winked at him. "And he _hates_ to be called Drake."

"Do I know you?" Harry repeated, somewhat dazed.

She shrugged. "We were at school together, but I don't think we ever actually spoke to one another. I'm Astoria Greengrass. You can call me Storie."


	2. Draco

A/N - again, just a suggestion, the song "I'm Moving On" by Rascal Flatts.

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><p>Draco Malfoy was so frustrated he couldn't even curse.<p>

So he settled for slamming his fist into the train station wall, and making a sound that came out something like "Unrgh!"

It had seemed like a fabulous plan, like something straight out of a novel. To run away from everything and everyone, with nothing but the clothes on his back.

Apparently the novels left out the part where you found yourself in the middle of a train station, with no muggle money and no wand.

"Hello, Draco."

As if this comedy of errors could get worse, he turned to find a schoolmate standing behind him.

"Lovegood." He barked as a greeting, hoping she would take the hint and go away. Unfortunately, she never was the sharpest knife in the drawer.

"Are you headed back to Devon as well?" she tilted her head at him. "Perhaps we'll be on the same train."

"Habntgrrrtckt" he muttered under his breath.

"I'm sorry, Draco. Are you still under the effects of a spell? I didn't understand you." She looked up at him in concern.

"I _said_," he growled. "I don't have a ticket. Because I don't have any muggle money."

"Oh," she said, her mouth round. "That can be fixed. I'll buy your ticket."

She turned toward the counter. He grabbed her shoulder.

"You are _not_ buying my ticket." He snapped_._

"Do you want to stay in the train station, then?" she asked, puzzled.

He frowned. She waved her hand.

"You can pay me back." She shrugged and skipped over to the ticket counter.

He trailed her over to the window, and watched curiously as she handed the clerk a little card with numbers and letters on it. The clerk handed it back with a boarding pass.

"Where is the money?" he asked in confusion.

"The card," she explained "is connected to the muggle bank. It takes the money from your vault and puts it in the vault of whomever you want to pay."

His brow creased. "How does it do that?"

"Magic." She handed him the ticket with a smile and headed toward the platform, pulling her wheeled trunk behind her. He quickly fell into step beside her.

He discreetly reached into a hidden pocket in his coat, withdrawing a handful of galleons and slipped them into her pocket. It was probably twice the cost of the ticket, but whatever. He might have to end up borrowing more money from her.

"The train is about to board." she informed him. "Are you hungry?"

They stopped in front of the snack counter. Without waiting for his answer, Luna began placing an assortment of sandwiches, crackers, sweets, and bottled drinks on the counter. Glancing up at Draco, she reached over and added an apple to the collection.

She gave the man that little card again. The clerk placed the food into a paper bag, while Draco slipped the bottles into his pockets. Luna handed him the bag, and turned back toward the platform.

"What are you doing?" Draco stopped in the middle of the concourse to bark at her. "Didn't anyone ever teach you to be a lady?" He shoved the bag into her hands and took the lead for her trunk from her.

"My mother did teach me some things, like how to do laundry, but she died when I was young." Luna tilted her head up to look at him as he led her to the platform. "My father never tried to teach me to be a lady. I'm sure he probably doesn't know how."

Draco just shook his head. "No, I'm sure all he knows about is hunting loraxes and sneedles and hummingfish."

"I've never heard of any of those creatures, Draco." Luna looked at him with her eyes wider than normal. "You'll have to tell me about them."

He palmed his face and kept walking. They soon reached the platform, where Draco helped get her trunk loaded and she found them an empty compartment. Luna brought out the food, and they ate, making small talk about their meal. They put away what they hadn't consumed for later. Draco looked out the window, wondering if she would just leave him alone for a while.

Of course not.

"So why are you taking the train back alone instead of returning home with your parents?" she asked.

"Because I didn't want to go back with my parents." he hissed.

"Well then, it's a fortunate thing that I found you, because now you don't have to be alone." she smiled.

"Sometimes people want to be alone, Lovegood." There was no more hostility in his voice, just resignation.

She looked up him solemnly. "But alone is a very lonely place to be, Draco."

He turned from the earnestness he saw in her eyes to look out the window again. "So why are you going back alone?"

"My father's in Azkaban." she told him softly, with sadness in her big grey eyes for the first time he could remember. "I didn't have anyone to come and collect me at school."

He felt like an even bigger heel than he already knew he was. "I'm sorry, Luna. I didn't mean to bring up..." he sighed. "My father was in Azkaban. That sucks."

"Yeah, it does." her voice was so soft he barely heard her.

"Why didn't you go home with Potter and his crew or the Weasleys? It's not like they'd even notice one more person." He didn't mean for his remark to come out as rude as it sounded.

Luna didn't seem offended, just sad. "I didn't feel like I should be there right now. I just broke Neville's heart."

"You did what?" Draco's eyebrows shot up.

"He came to me in the middle of the battle and told me that he had fancied me for the longest time." she looked at the floor. "I told him I didn't feel the same. He was terribly hurt, but it would have been worse to lie to him."

For some reason, having gossip to hold over Longbottom's head held absolutely no appeal at the moment.

"Maybe the narglespurts brought me here so you wouldn't have to ride back to Devon alone." he said, wondering silently why it was suddenly so important to him to cheer her up.

She smiled and made a sound that was almost a giggle. "I don't think nargles and wrackspurts could interbreed, but the results would be amazing if they did, don't you think?"

He wasn't sure what those things were, much less what you would get if you crossed them, so he just nodded.

"I'm glad you're here." she looked out the window, trying to see what he was staring at again. "I've been alone a lot. I'm glad I don't have to be alone today." she turned back to face him. "And you're glad you don't have to be alone too. You just don't want to say it."

He stared at her, because she was right. "I'd better get used to being alone." he turned back to the window. "That's what my future holds."

"Only if that's the way you choose to make it, Draco." she tilted her head. "I could have left you to carry on your conversation with those purple kneed scuttlebugs in the train station wall, but I didn't. I made the choice not to be alone. I decided to be with a friend."

"Yeah, well, I'm not going to have much choice about it." he huffed. "I betrayed Voldemort's side, but then when Harry Potter gave me the chance to join him, I just ran away like a frightened child. There is no one in the wizarding world who will want to be my friend."

She leaned over and placed her small hand over his on his knee. "I will be your friend, Draco."

She looked up at him with so much sincerity that he had to turn to the window again to compose himself. Because he was not going to turn into some bloody Hufflepuff and tear up in front of her.

"I never wanted any of this." he said hoarsely. "Being better than mudbloods is one thing. Killing them is something else entirely."

She didn't say anything, so he continued. "I never wanted to join Voldemort. But he threatened to kill my mother if I didn't. All I wanted was for her to be safe. For _me _to be safe. But the more I did to make that happen, the worse things got. I did awful things. I didn't want to, but I did."

Luna moved from sitting across from him to sitting beside him. She took his hand in hers, tracing the lines in his palm. "Other people will forgive you one day, Draco. But first of all, you have to forgive yourself."

She looked up at him, but he was still looking out the window. "I don't deserve anyone's forgiveness. Not even my own."

She reached up, placing one finger under his chin and turning his head to look at her. "That's the thing about forgiveness, Draco. People don't usually deserve it. But if you give it anyway, it's an act of mercy. It makes you a better person. And that's what you need right now. To become a better person, in your own eyes."

He squeezed her hand that was still holding his. He didn't say anything else, and she, seeming to sense he needed some time with his thoughts, let him be.

They sat in silence for quite a while, him still staring unseeing out the window, and her looking around the compartment at anything and everything that caught her attention.

Finally she moved back over to the other bench, retrieving one of the bottles of muggle soda to take a long drink. Draco looked over to see what she was doing. She held out the bottle to him in offering, and her eyes widened in surprise when he took it and sipped experimentally.

"That's actually good." he said, handing the bottle back to her. "It's just the fizz is a little weird."

She nodded. "It takes a little getting used to. So if you didn't want to travel back home with your parents, were you going to go back to your house with them?" she asked.

He shrugged, looking away again. "I'm not in a big hurry to get back to my house."

"It might not be so bad now," she poked at an invisible spot on her pants leg. "You know, a lot fewer Death Eaters..." she looked up at him quite seriously. And then winked.

He grinned for a brief second before sobering. "All last night, all I could think about was just wanting to get away from the battle and go home. This morning, it's just ... it feels like home is the one place I don't belong."

"Maybe it's time for you to find a new home." she suggested.

He didn't know what she meant by that, so he let it go. "What about you?" he looked at her briefly. "Are you going back to your house, even though your father won't be there?"

"I don't have a house to go back to." she turned to face the window now. "It was blown up when the Death Eaters came to arrest Harry and Ron and Hermione."

Once again, he felt like a jerk. "So you need a new home too." he murmured.

She nodded. "I just had the idea that I should go back to Devon, and when I got there, things would be all right."

"How do you do that?" he burst out. "How do you go on like everything is going to be just right, when nothing in the world will ever be right again?"

She looked at him with hope in her eyes. "It's not that nothing will ever be right again. It's that nothing will ever be the same again. So you just have to go into the new situation believing that everything will be good again. Because life will be good again. It will just be different. If you try to hold onto the things you don't have any more, you could miss the new wonderful things that are right in front of you."

She let him digest that information for a while, rummaging through her bag for an old copy of the Quibbler.

Which she of course read upside down.

"You know," he finally spoke again, just minutes before the train reached the station. "There's an old cottage on the back of the Malfoy Manor property. It used to be the gamekeeper's house, years ago, when one of my ancestors took up hunting." he looked over to see if he had her attention, before looking back out the window. "No one's lived there since I don't know when, but it's been kept up. You can't even see the main house from there. It's small. Just two bedrooms, a common room, and a kitchen. But it would be plenty of room to make a new home for a while, for a couple of friends, until they figured out what they were going to do after that."

She reached over and took his hand again. "It sounds like a wonderful place. Do those loraxes and sneedles and hummingfish live around there?"

The train stopped. They stood, collecting their things, and then Luna took Draco's hand, leading him out into the sunlight.


	3. George

The song suggestion for this one is Homesick by Mercy Me.

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><p>George Weasley watched the train run around in vain.<p>

It was on a small circular track. No matter how long it ran, it would never go anywhere.

Which was pretty much how George's life felt these days.

He went to work, at the store he built with Fred. He came home to the flat he had shared with Fred. Everything in both places reminded him of Fred. Like the toy train that they had begged their parents to buy for a whole year before they finally got it for their seventh birthday. Actually, the only thing in either place that he had not gotten at Fred's side was the hole where his ear should have been.

The fact was, he could count on one hand the times he and Fred had been apart more than two hours in the whole of their lives. Including this one. The one time that wouldn't end. The nightmare that he couldn't awake from.

Padma and Pavarti were twins, but they had separate lives. They had friends and interests apart from one another. Gred and Forge had never done that. Every aspect of their lives had been so tightly interwoven that it didn't seem possible that one could be alive and the other dead.

Which was how he found himself sitting here tonight, in the corner of his and Fred's bedroom, watching the train run around in circles, half a bottle of firewhiskey in, and a bottle of poison on the floor beside him.

Angelina found him there. It was fittingly ironic. The one person other than his family who checked on him wasn't the girl he had dated sporadically before the battle, but Fred's girlfriend.

"What do you think you're doing?" she shrieked, her voice a mixture of horror, anger, and panic.

"Setting things right," George told her, reaching for the bottle of poison that she had snatched up and held tightly.

Angelina threw the bottle across the room, where it smashed against the doorframe. "There would be nothing right about you taking your own life." she told him firmly.

"There's nothing right about being without Fred!" he cried.

"You think I don't know that?" she demanded, tears streaming down her face. "They say home is where your heart is. If that's the case, I don't belong in this world, because my heart is wherever Fred is!"

Like they had so many times before, they reached out for each other, crying into each other's shoulders. They both cried until they had no more tears. Until their breath came in shuddering gasps and their noses were so stuffy they couldn't breath properly.

"Promise me," she said, pulling back to look at him. "That you won't ever do that. That you won't leave me here alone to deal with everything."

He didn't answer. Wouldn't look her in the eye.

"Do it for me, because I loved Fred almost as much as you did." she squeezed his hand. "But if you can't do it for me, do it for your mum and Percy. Because Percy feels so guilty over everything, that if you took your life, he would take his own. As awful as it's been on your mum losing one of her sons, imagine if she lost three."

He looked up, that familiar desolation and hopelessness in his eyes. "I promise. I won't take myself out. But you have to promise that you won't give up on me. That you'll keep coming round until I learn how to live without him."

"I promise." she whispered, scooting in beside him against the wall, her head on his shoulder, his cheek against the top of her head, while he told her the story of the train. And then told her about the brooms they had gotten the following Christmas. And about the potions set they had gotten for their eighth birthday, and how they had blown up Charlie's bed with it.

Like they had so many times before, the two people who had loved Fred Weasley the most spent another evening laughing and crying together.

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><p>Coming soon - HermioneRon and Neville.


End file.
